[HN Gopher] Agrivoltaics: A Sustainable Synergy Between Agricult...
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Agrivoltaics: A Sustainable Synergy Between Agriculture and Solar
Energy
Author : thunderbong
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-05-13 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mercurialtrends.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mercurialtrends.com)
| sholladay wrote:
| The writing style of this article is very repetitive and drawn
| out. Maybe AI generated?
|
| > Reduced Greenhouse Gas Emissions
|
| > Agrivoltaic systems can also help to reduce greenhouse gas
| emissions in agriculture. Traditional farming methods rely
| heavily on fossil fuels for irrigation, transportation, and
| fertilizer production. These activities contribute significantly
| to greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change.
|
| > They can also help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by
| generating clean energy from solar panels. By using renewable
| energy, farmers can reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, which
| can help to lower their carbon footprint. Additionally,
| Agrivoltaic systems can reduce the need for conventional
| electricity, which is often generated from fossil fuels."
| seu wrote:
| Human or AI generated, it's clearly SEO optimized. I think
| that's the real problem.
| samwillis wrote:
| Really I blame Google for this, obviously any online
| publication needs to optimise for traffic, they need to pay
| the bills. But Google's latest algorithm changes quite
| clearly prioritise longer prose, and so bulking out text in
| articles has become the norm. It's a shame, and Google have
| the resources to do better, but unfortunately not the
| incentives. Most of the pages have some amount of Google ads
| on them.
| friendswdorthy wrote:
| Edit: oh okay just downvote because of an observation. Nice
| community here!
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| jackmott wrote:
| [dead]
| hosh wrote:
| This is a specific application of a broader design pattern found
| in the permaculture world: planting combinations of plants at
| different canopy layers, ecological functions, and yields. The
| solar panels would be taking the place of an understory or shrub
| canopy layer, while there are herbaceous, ground cover, and root
| zone layers you can work with.
|
| While solar panels have an yield useful for humans, it would be
| even better if it can participate in the ecological system.
| Planting instead say, a palo verde would yield edible beans, with
| the tree itself acting as a nitrogen fixer. A sea buckthorne tree
| also acts as a nitrogen fixer, with roots propogating (more sea
| buckthrone trees pops up on its own) and yields high vitamin-c
| berries.
|
| What ecological function can a solar panel contribute to?
| Rhapso wrote:
| How do solar panels interact with condensation?
| hosh wrote:
| I don't know. But that gets into the broader design pattern
| of engineering a microclimate, whether that is changing local
| humidity and temperature levels.
|
| Perhaps, the structure itself can also provide some other
| functions. The pylons, for example, can double as a way for
| deep root watering.
| mrDmrTmrJ wrote:
| Providing shade and lowering peak temperatures - allowing
| sensitive plants to survive in a broader range of climate &
| light conditions.
| hosh wrote:
| That's a result of occupying a certain canopy layer. Any
| other plant that occupies that canopy layer can do the same.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| I would assume that the biggest factor in this would be that the
| racks and solar panels make it very difficult to use large
| machinery such as tractors and harvesting machines? Somehow this
| isn't even addressed.
| epistasis wrote:
| Seems pretty straightforward to seeing appropriate machinery
| and use that instead of machinery designed for an entirely
| different setting.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| these look geared towards small-scale, high $/kg farming for
| berries, veg, and other hand-picked food. I'd imagine anything
| on a larger scale for high-yield grain farming would be a waste
| of land
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The racking is either spaced to allow machinery between rows,
| or panels are suspended using cables and a structure above the
| machinery max height. Not a consideration for crops that are
| hand harvested.
|
| https://www.farmersjournal.ie/agrivoltaics-can-crops-and-sol...
|
| https://d3mdtxxgfz6upn.cloudfront.net/WEBFILES/000/753/181/1...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If you're already putting structures in the field with the
| plant, I wonder if they could support the movement of smaller
| machines that do the same task.
|
| Instead of driving a factory over the crop, imagine a variety
| of smaller robots zooming around on rails or something. Like
| https://farm.bot but huge.
| samwillis wrote:
| Farm machinery got "big" because it enables one human to be
| more productive, cover more area in one unit of time. Human
| time is one of the most expensive resources in farming.
|
| As we automate more farming, and move to self operated
| machinery, we can shrink those machines down again. We can
| design fleets of machines to work in tandem, and operate around
| other structures, such as solar. The age of the tram lines is
| going to come to an end.
|
| This also provides opportunities for replacing chemicals with
| small robots, such as for weeding.
| Throw73849 wrote:
| Or maybe use illegal cheap labour from another country.
| Something like feudalism, but more modern!
| samwillis wrote:
| You joke, but there are a lot of crops that can't easily be
| machine picked, and probably never will be. Although I'm a
| proponent for legal safe immigration for sessional work
| with a route to permanent residency. The lack of legal
| routes results in unsafe working conditions and modern
| slavery.
| ianai wrote:
| Ah but now supplemented with a push to legalize child
| labor in the US.
| samwillis wrote:
| Child labour is already legal (to some extent) in
| agriculture, unfortunately.
| ianai wrote:
| And even more often overlooked by those benefiting from
| it.
| Throw73849 wrote:
| Why would I joke? People are cheaper than machines.
|
| Edit: "illegal" in terms of work law, minimal salary and
| safety standards. Legally imported workers are probably
| even cheaper and easier to exploit!
|
| Until we establish socialism, human labour will always be
| exploited and cheaper than machines!
| samwillis wrote:
| My mistake, I usually assume someone openly proposing
| illegal immigration, rather than safe legal immigration,
| as a solution is joking.
| shalmanese wrote:
| > Human time is one of the most expensive resources in
| farming.
|
| Not any more. A combine costs around a million bucks and has
| a total useful lifespan of about 10,000 hours which is $100
| an hour (not counting maintenance and fuel costs which approx
| doubles this rate) which far exceeds the cost of a human
| operator. Capital costs exceed labor costs for almost all
| types of farming these days.
| sholladay wrote:
| I would also like to see that discussed. There may be enough
| space on the ground for more compact machinery to do a similar
| job. Each machine might be less productive, but they would cost
| less, so you could have more of them and the operation would be
| more parallelized.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| You're correct that this is limited to manual harvesting but
| isn't that pretty common for partial shade crops?
| baron816 wrote:
| Partial shade crops include broccoli, asparagus, kale,
| carrots, brussels sprouts, peas...basically all the healthy
| stuff. Adding a whole second revenue stream to their
| production would make them more competitive with the
| unhealthy stuff (corn, rice, wheat).
| ianai wrote:
| Corn is an absolute miracle. It probably took hundreds of
| years for native Americans to cultivate and domesticate
| corn to the nutrient crop we know. Those three crops feed
| humanity. They shouldn't be shunned for what modern food
| processing practices. The US alone produces enough corn to
| feed well over 2 billion people per year.
| baron816 wrote:
| Sure, but it's just imbalanced in people's diets,
| partially because of the cost differential.
| Valgrim wrote:
| It's also pretty common to use solar fields for pasturing,
| especially where the slopes are too steep for heavy
| machinery.
| newsclues wrote:
| Do we have electric tractors?
|
| Are they viable given that weight is a serious issue for
| machinery on fields?
|
| Having lived on a rural farm, with solar panels on the barn, if
| you can use the harvested power on the farm, great, but once you
| start trying to distribute it, the problems start to show up
| because rural infrastructure isn't good, and there isn't enough
| demand in the local grid.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Sounds feasible. You'd need battery storage or less batteries
| and orchestration to charge farm equipment during solar
| production hours if no grid connection available, but micro
| grids are a well worn path at this point. Very popular in
| Australia's western geography and their Northern Territory,
| where there is not much transmission infra to speak of.
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/11/23/caterpillar-demonstrates-firs...
| worldsayshi wrote:
| > infrastructure isn't good
|
| I've heard this enough times that I might assume this is the
| bottle neck of a green transition of our electrical generation.
| What is being done about this? Is it an area where innovation
| or disruption can still happen? Are there any interesting
| things on the horizon for taking big leaps on fixing the
| electricity infrastructure? As a Fullstack/Cloud/Data engineer
| where could you put your feet down to contribute to solving
| this problem?
| jmartrican wrote:
| Having solar panels might be a good way to hedge your bets
| against a bad harvest. I imagine it can get quite sunny during a
| drought.
| seydor wrote:
| PVs are always raised off the ground.
|
| This is not some new invention, people just planted some stuff
| under the PVs.
|
| You can also get some goats to clean the weeds in the place
| before that. They will appreciate the shaded area (but hopefully
| not the cables)
| pfdietz wrote:
| > PVs are always raised off the ground.
|
| Not true.
|
| https://www.erthos.com/
| weinzierl wrote:
| One of the incentives the article doesn't mention is property
| tax. Where I live, agricultural land is taxed much less than
| other property. The moment you put solar on your meadow you pay
| the regular rate. I think it would be fair if property kept its
| agricultural tax status if it is used in an environmentally
| friendly way.
| konschubert wrote:
| But in turn, this means that solar plants will be developed to
| have pretend-farming below it.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Not at all. My opinion is that you should be taxed the same
| way no matter how you use the energy that falls on your soil
| from the sky. It shouldn't matter if it goes through
| chlorophyll or silicon.
| konschubert wrote:
| So you're saying that solar farm land should be taxed like
| farmland?
|
| That would remove the bad incentives. Personally I agree.
| mirpetri wrote:
| Plants love sun, why would I put them below a panel into shade.
|
| Article mentions blueberries which I grow and those which get the
| sunshine only half of the day (partly in shade) don't have the
| same sweet taste as other in better sunny spots of my garden.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > Plants love sun
|
| No. Some plants love direct sunshine and others don't.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| Unfortunately the article just hand-waves on this point,
| leaving it at "certain crops":
|
| > However, certain crops are better suited for this system
| due to their ability to thrive under partial shade.
| voisin wrote:
| You can get bifacial panels that let light filter through. Not
| sure what is filtered, but perhaps the remainder is sufficient
| for certain crops?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Here is a chart of DLI (daily light integral) needed for lots
| of common crops.
|
| https://www.horti-growlight.com/en-gb/typical-ppfd-dli-
| value...
|
| Here is a map of DLI in the USA by month.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Maps-of-monthly-
| outdoor-...
|
| So there is some wiggle room maybe. Looks like about 30 is
| good DLI and the USA gets 40-60 in the summer.
|
| My gut feeling though tells me that the best performance is
| panels that use all the light or plants that get full access
| to it.
| r00fus wrote:
| Plants can also get too much Sun just like they can be
| overwatered.
|
| That's where agrivoltaics and irrigation can help.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| This would vary so much by species of plant, cultivars within
| species, local climate, etc. I suspect in your case it wouldn't
| make sense, but in some places it's a common practice to shade
| crops with raised sheets of cloth for example. In those cases,
| assuming the shading is done fairly consistently (no need to
| put panels up and down frequently), using panels could be a
| great idea.
|
| Where I live I need all the sun I can get as well. I have to
| start tomatoes in mid February and get them into the soil in
| June, and make sure they're either in my greenhouse where it's
| warm or in the most exposed spots in my garden. If I shaded
| anything my yields would be garbage.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| They do love sun, but they might not like intense heat.
|
| Take those blueberries, Mine hate being in certain parts of the
| patio because whilst they get full sun, they also get longer
| and more extreme levels of heat. I almost lost them the year
| before last.
|
| (this is with a decent irrigation system too)
| lpapez wrote:
| Agrivoltaics seems like a cool idea but one of the things I
| rarely ever see mentioned is how chemicals from the panels
| interact with the crops. Steel can rust and if rust gets washed
| away into the earth and then the plants... well that cant be
| beneficial right? And I bet steel is the least toxic element of
| the panels.
| hosh wrote:
| There are plants that can do soil remediation on soil with
| heavy metals, though you can't eat them and you still have to
| find a way to process or sequester the heavy metal. Cilantro
| (coriander) is an example.
| kibwen wrote:
| Iron is often used as a fertilizer, so rusted support beams
| aren't a problem, either for the plants or for humans. And all
| the interesting parts of a solar panel are under glass, they
| aren't being washed away by rain.
| sigstoat wrote:
| the solar facilities i'm familiar with use aluminum beams for
| the structure. it is more than strong enough, lighter so it is
| easier to install/ship to site, and requires no special
| treatment to survive the environment for more than the life of
| the installation.
|
| the panels themselves do not contain steel, either.
|
| > And I bet steel is the least toxic element of the panels.
|
| perhaps, but nothing on the panels comes off. they're solid
| objects largely impervious to all forms of precipitation. more
| of your house washes away in a storm than comes off a panel.
| hannob wrote:
| Rust is just iron oxide, which in small quantities is a
| relatively benign substance. And probably there's more rust
| coming from old farming equipment than from the (likely high
| quality, because they are built for expensive solar panels)
| steel structures here.
|
| The solar cells themselve are mostly made out of silicon, which
| also isn't a dangerous substance.
|
| I don't think this is an issue.
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